From The Editor | July 29, 2011

CompTIA Breakaway: Education Focus Continues

by Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor
As I pack up and prepare to head out to CompTIA Breakaway 2011, I had the chance to talk with CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux about his goals for this year's event in Washington, D.C. He explained that members should expect to see a continuation of CompTIA's stated goal of turning Breakaway into an education-focused event. "We've focused on bringing good educational material to this event," says Thibodeaux. "Last year it was healthcare, this year we'll add cloud, and we've also started to tackle unified communications."

He says that if there is only one thing attendees walk away with, he hopes it will be a sense of gaining valuable knowledge. "We want people to walk away wowed that all the educational content they need to grow their businesses was here, plus the opportunity to meet and talk with vendors they either are already doing business with, or want to do business with," says Thibodeaux.

As part of that educational push, CompTIA is striving to eliminate those days when trade shows were simply an opportunity for vendors to deliver canned speeches about their products. "We also don't want the vendors to just consider this a show where they get leads," adds Thibodeaux. "We have developed a vendor education track, and we'd like to identify three or four more ideas around which we can offer education next year with the goal of developing equally strong tracks for vendors and channel businesses."

Now, Thibodeaux shared more insight with me in terms of two big announcements coming at Breakaway, but I've promised to keep that under wraps until after the keynote on Tuesday morning. You can follow our coverage of Breakaway all week here at BSMinfo.com/insidebreakaway.